Campaigners against the HS2 rail line Pat Mather and John Keleher in Pickmere, Cheshire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond

It's a sodden Monday morning in Ruislip, the final bit of suburban sprawl on Greater London's western edge, all mock Tudor villas, cul-de-sacs of 1960s maisonettes and inter-war shopping parades. Inside the Barn Hotel, a security guard stands sentry by a small function room, where a map streaked with a thick grey line is laid out on a long table. "I think this is a waste of money," says one woman. "I don't want to go to Birmingham anyway. And how much is all this going to cost?" A man wearing a badge that says "property team" quietly parries some of her points, but chooses not to engage with others.

This is one of many "information events", held to consult people about the compensation arrangements for the high-speed rail link – HS2, in officialspeak – that is planned to extend from here to Birmingham, and beyond. The whole exercise has happened once already. But in March, a high court judge ruled that the initial compensation consultation had been "so unfair as to be unlawful", and demanded a re-run – which may be why the event at the Barn Hotel is so low-key, suggesting two groups of people wearily repeating a script they have long known by heart.

Over the road at Ruislip rugby club, by contrast, the atmosphere crackles with energy. Here, the local anti-HS2 group has put on its own day-long event, and the room is full of visitors. There are maps here, too. And all the while, a film flickers away on a projector screen, gravely narrated by the comic actor Geoffrey "Butterflies" Palmer, who sounds like he is describing something very threatening indeed. "It will destroy jobs," he says. "It will destroy homes. It will destroy businesses … "

What's happening today, explains local anti-HS2 activist Keri Brennan, is intended as a "counter-event" to balance out the official version. A native of Croydon, she and her family moved to Ruislip four years ago, having "stretched ourselves to the limit", and bought a four-bedroom house. Back then, the last Labour government was sketching out the initial plans for a new high-speed line, and Brennan soon found out that the tracks were planned to run through her back garden. "I felt like I was going mad, because I was so stressed about it, and no one else seemed to know," she tells me.

For her, there has been some good news: confirmation that by way of "mitigation", the line through Ruislip will be put in a tunnel. Her house, though, is effectively unsellable – which, in an area usually associated with snap sales and rising prices, speaks volumes. As with so many of the people whose homes line the route, for her, it looks like the promises of the property-owning democracy have come to nothing, and the modern nightmare of negative equity has arrived in spades.

Ten minutes drive away is the Hillingdon Outdoor Activity Centre, a 90-acre facility run as an educational charity since 1969 and built around a lake, where 20,000 young Londoners come every year to sail, canoe, windsurf, camp, and get acquainted with nature, and with peace and quiet. The HS2 line will cut directly across it, snaking over the site – including the lake – on a huge viaduct.

Jeff Creek, 62, has been the principal for 30 years: when construction work starts, his full-time staff will be made redundant and, as far as he understands it, their work will stop. The HS2 officials he has met, he says, seem to think that once the line has been built, the centre will be able to re-open, but he is having none of it: the fact that one train every four minutes will pass directly over the campsite, he tells me, is a pretty good indication of why it won't work. "This is a rural environment: as good as it gets in west London," he says. "Kids come here because it's the countryside. This thing will just make it into more suburban sprawl."

Ron Ryall, in Ruislip: 'I'm going to lose my business and my home.' Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

The centre's entrance sits next to an 18th-century farmhouse, where 66-year-old Ron Ryall lives with his wife and 86-year-old aunt, as well as his son and daughter. He owns a car repair business 50 or so yards away, and both are marked for compulsory purchase; what will happen to the nearby house where his elderly mother lives is unclear, as is the likely outcome of negotiations with HS2 Ltd about a price for everything they require. "I'm going to lose my business and my home," he says. "What's a fair price for a lifetime's work? They've just left us up in the air." His voice then gets louder. "An Englishman's home is his castle," he says, grimly. "Until HS2 want it."

Throughout his adult life, he tells me, he has always voted Conservative. "But now," he says, "I'm going to vote for the people who don't want it." And who's that? "Ukip." Over the next two days, this is a refrain I hear a lot.

Phase one of HS2, intended to be up and running by 2026, will go from London to Birmingham via a remarkably straight route that runs through Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire. Phase two, which is set to open in 2033, will be split into two lines, running from Birmingham to Leeds and Manchester respectively, and cutting through swathes of the Midlands and the north. Needless to say, both projects are surrounded by great clouds of controversy about the years of construction they will entail, the compensation arrangements, and the damage that will be done to the environment – not just from the laying of tracks, but also from such factors as the excavated "spoil", much of which will be used to somehow reshape local landscapes.

Whether HS2 will happen at all is still not 100% certain: for phase one, the required legislation is unlikely to be passed before the next election, and the phase two timetable extends well beyond that. This week, anti-HS2 groups and an arry of councils began a challenge to the plans in the supreme court. There is serious dissent about the plan inside the Conservative party – and as far as Labour is concerned, scepticism among senior figures seems to be growing fast: a final decision about which way the party will jump is now expected in the spring. Both inside and beyond Westminster, there are mounting doubts about the business case, and bafflement at HS2's cost: at the last count, up from £34.2bn to £42.6bn, plus £7.5bn for rolling stock, though plenty of people – among them, Boris Johnson – think the total figure will climb way above that, to £70bn and beyond.

As the projected route winds through towns, villages and expanses of countryside, you get a sharp sense of a backwoods rebellion: fields smattered with the red-and-black Stop HS2 logos, and the odd slogan – "It's all about the money David, stupid". In sedate–looking villages, there are noticeboards featuring "campaign updates"; in pubs and cafes, it feels like the subject is never far away from conversation.

An anti-HS2 meeting at the Ruislip rugby club. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Two hours or so after leaving Ruislip, I drive along the A413 into the Chilterns. In Wendover – where the HS2 line will pass through the landscape on a 500m viaduct, making the nearby Chiltern main line look like a model railway – I arrive at the Shoulder of Mutton pub to meet a deputation of six anti-HS2 activists, five of whom voted Conservative at the election, but now say they will think seriously about other options. Among them is 73-year-old Marion Clayton, who used to be a Conservative county councillor. "A lot of people feel the way I do," she says. "They want to support individual MPs, because they are trying to get HS2 stopped, or get better mitigation, or whatever. But I would not want to vote for David Cameron's government." In Buckinghamshire, she reminds me, Ukip recently won six county council seats from the Tories – and HS2 sat at the heart of what happened.

Sixty miles further up the route, I spend the evening in the village of Offchurch, three miles to the east of Leamington Spa, in the company of five anti-HS2 campaigners who, as with everyone else I meet along the route, are in daily touch with campaigners in exactly the same position. They are also au fait with the issue's international dimension: the day after we meet, 66-year-old Madeleine Wahlberg is going to Tallinn in Estonia to attend a meeting of EU transport officials, and harden up contacts with anti-high speed rail campaigners across Europe.

Among the people I meet here is a local arable farmer called Andrew McGregor, who has been served notice that he will have to give up a 26-acre field, which earns him around £17,500 annually, so trees can be planted to make up for lost woodland elsewhere. Visibly seething, he says that the government seems to have no idea about the economics of agriculture, and hands me an 8x6 photo of the field in question. On the back, in slanted block capitals, is written: "3 FARMS ARE SEVERED IN THIS PHOTOGRAPH ALONE. HUNDREDS OF ACRES OF FERTILE LAND IS TO BE SACRIFICED, NOT JUST FOR THE LINE BUT FOR VERY DUBIOUS 'ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION'."

As well as being the chancellor of the exchequer and among HS2's most vocal champions, George Osborne is also the MP for Tatton, the Cheshire constituency that includes Wilmslow, Knutsford, Northwich and a sizeable expanse of countryside. Earlier this year, he was the focus of loud controversy when the Tory leader of Cheshire East council issued a statement praising Osborne and his fellow Tory minister Edward Timpson for having "fought hard to keep the line away from Knutsford and Tatton, which we have been successful in achieving". The statement was hastily retracted and the council said it had "made a mistake".

The proposed line does indeed avoid most of Osborne's constituency, though it intrudes on its northern edge, not least when it comes to the village of Pickmere. Here, I meet a tireless anti-HS2 campaigner called Ewen Simpson, another resident of an apparently unsellable local house named Helen Shaul, and John Keleher and Pat Mather, who breed ponies at their stud farm. We sit drinking tea in its office, full of equestrian paraphernalia, and talk about the story that now defines their lives. The farm was bought by Mather's family 60 years ago: now, HS2 will take away 19 of their 23 acres, and 60% of land that they rent close by, along with their farmhouse and outbuildings.

They began to sense what was afoot on 28 January 2013, when the proposals for Phase 2 were first announced. "We sat watching George Osborne on breakfast TV on that morning," says Keleher. "And I turned to John and said, 'We've just been told to tighten our belts. Where's all this money coming from?'" adds Mather.

"About half an hour later, we got a phone call from a friend," says Keleher. "She said, 'Have you seen the HS2 maps? You'd better have a look.' We then went on the internet and … Oh my God. I was just numb. You just couldn't take it in. Someone was just drawing a line and saying, 'You're out.'"When they initially sent emails and letters to Osborne, they tell me, they didn't get a reply. Of late, they have been more successful, though the correspondence is always based on what Keleher calls a "set spiel": as he summarises it: "It's a good idea, we're going to do it, put up with it."

I ask what it is like living in the midst of such an uncertain but potentially life-changing set of circumstances. "Oh, you live HS2," he says. "Every morning I get up, put the computer on, check the emails, and see what's relevant to HS2. I get a list of 30 or 40 links every day. You're just desperate to find something that's going to give you hope." They have yet to seriously consider a life that does not involve the farm. "Our aim is to stop HS2," says Keleher, "and if we can't, then we'll have to think." Having always voted Conservative, he says that Labour's increasing doubts about HS2 suggest that they may be more deserving of his vote, something that clearly feels very strange indeed.

Two hours later, after I have driven from the route of the Manchester extension to the proposed line that will serve Leeds, my journey comes to a close in the Yorkshire village of Church Fenton, near Tadcaster: the end of the planned HS2 line, and also its most northerly point. Its place in the HS2 story is both fascinating, and rather bizarre: the village sits on a "spur" that will go beyond Leeds – according to the official blurb, intended to "enable HS2 trains to run on to the East Coast Main Line to serve York, Darlington, Durham and Newcastle" (though they would have to drastically slow down). Church Fenton is already bordered on one side by a railway that serves Leeds and York – and the arrival of HS2 would mean it would be completely enclosed, sitting in the middle of a triangle formed by railway tracks.

HS2 will pass over local fields on a viaduct, and skirt a new-ish housing development called Sandwath Drive, built around a snooker-table green and a childrens' play area. Here, what HS2 means for house prices is a highly charged issue, to say the least.

Most of the proposals for HS2 compensation are out for consultation and therefore unconfirmed, but in rural areas, the current plan goes something like this: 60 metres or less from the centre of the line is the so-called safeguarding zone, in which the most likely outcome is compulsory purchase. Between 60 and 120 metres away, it's proposed that houses will be in a voluntary purchase zone, so HS2 Ltd will buy any property at a supposed market price, plus an extra amount to cover costs. The houses on Sandwath Drive, however, sit just beyond that boundary, meaning that residents can only apply for an "exceptional hardship" scheme which, as far as phase one is concerned, has benefited only around a quarter of the people who applied.

Angus Donald, 49, has lived with his family on Sandwath Drive for seven years. A house close to his, he tells me, was originally bought for £415,000, and recently sold for £265,000. "We feel like we've been robbed of everything we've ever worked for," he says.

"We've been mugged by our own government," says Jo Mason, a parish councillor and co-founder of the local anti-HS2 Action Group.

In Mason's nearby home, we sit having afternoon tea. There are Stop HS2 Fairy cakes iced in the regulation red and blue, and not for the first time, I end up intently studying reams of maps.

One question springs to mind. What do they make of accusations that they are just nimbys? "This is destroying our village," says Mason. "But even if this bit gets cancelled tomorrow, I'll carry on fighting against HS2. Because it's bad for the country, it's bad for the environment, and it's bad for the economy."